Tolerance always has limits - it cannot tolerate what is itself actively intolerant.
Interpretation
Tolerance cannot accept actions or beliefs that are intolerant.
This quote emphasizes the importance of recognizing boundaries when it comes to tolerance. While it is essential to accept diverse perspectives, there are limits to this acceptance when faced with beliefs or actions that seek to undermine or destroy the very values of tolerance and coexistence. It calls for a balance between openness to differing views and safeguarding against harmful ideologies that promote intolerance.
In practice
During a debate on campus, this quote could be used to highlight the need for a respectful discourse while addressing hate speech.
A liberal education will impart an awareness of the amazing and precious complexity of human relationships. Since those relationships are violated more often out of insensitiveness than out of deliberate intent, whatever increases sensitiveness of perception and understanding humanizes life.
Everyone recognizes a distinction between knowledge and wisdom. . . Wisdom is a kind of knowledge. It is knowledge of the nature, career, and consequences of human values. Since these cannot be separated from the human organism and the social scene, the moral ways of man cannot be understood without knowledge of the ways of things and institutions.
In contrast to totalitarianism, democracy can face and live with the truth about itself.
Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness.
The easiest rationalization for the refusal to seek the truth is the denial that truth exists.
The mob that hails the man on horseback, the Caesars and conquering heroes, does not retain its freedoms for long.
Racism is predictable. It's predicted by interaction or lack thereof with people unlike you, people of other races.
I cheat him, I deceive him, yet the world does not sink in sulphur-colored mists. Madness conquers. I can no longer put my mosaics together. I just cry and laugh.
The roles of art, morality, religion, political faith, science itself are not to repair organic exhaustion nor to provide sound functioning of the organs. All this supraphysical life is built and expanded not because of the demands of the cosmic environment but because of the demands of the social environment.
Look, if I were alone in the world, I would have the right to choose despair, solitude and self-fulfillment. But I am not alone.
Standing armies shall in time be totally abolished.
Perfect wisdom has four parts: Wisdom, the principle of doing things aright. Justice, the principle of doing things equally in public and private. Fortitude, the principle of not fleeing danger, but meeting it. Temperance, the principle of subduing desires and living moderately.
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